Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  Once upon a time there was a war machine you loved.

  That was Miss Sarah Chapman talking, that difficult, crotchety ghost. Eventually she would dwindle into pale voiceless insignificance, along with Mrs. Clifford Morris, who was totally insignificant from the start to finish of her brief but expensive existence.

  “We’re going to discover a new declaration of independence, a new pursuit of happiness,” Susan said as they piled clothes and shoes in the back of the car.

  “A new declaration of independence,” Ms. Sarah Morris said. “A new pursuit of happiness.”

  Miss Sarah Chapman tried to point out that her English ancestors had recoiled from these grandiose phrases. Ms. Sarah Morris merely smiled tolerantly. For the time being she was an echo chamber in which the words resounded defiantly. But that would change. Eventually they could become part of her bones and blood, her new American self.

  Want to bet? whispered Miss Sarah Chapman, that persistent English ghost.

  In the desert, visitors other than Susan Hardy’s cohorts in Women for Peace and Freedom (WFPF) kept the ghost alive. First Sarah’s daughter Elizabeth, precariously balanced between drug-free hope and drug-drenched despair. Elizabeth could not deal with a mother who hated her father, who denied her brother was a hero and burned his letters, who told her the man she loved, the doctor who had rescued her from the needles and nightmares of San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury because she was so beautiful and now wanted to marry her was a male fraud and tyrant who only wanted to own a toy woman he had created. For one thing Sarah was not sure if that was true, just because Susan Hardy said it was. Even then she saw msdom was not always synonymous with wisdom.

  Next came daughter Margaret on the long-distance telephone from England, where she was continuing to become the world’s leading expert on China. She had been closer to Charlie than anyone else in the family and she required special comforting. You cannot be a comforter when your soul is consumed by hatred. So Ms. Sarah Morris had to call on the ghost of Miss Sarah Chapman to remember how deep, how pervasive, the love of planes and flight ran in Charlie’s blood. She talked about her father and about Cliff. She urged Margaret to go out to Bedlington Royal Air Force base and imagine the Rainbow Express landing with one engine while Miss Sarah Chapman stood in front of the Watch Office praying her in. She had to make Margaret, who valued thought above feeling (or told herself she did), accept the awful inevitability of Charlie’s death.

  Finally, unexpectedly, the most important visitor: Frank Buchanan. He came with tears on his face, hobbling on a cane since arthritis had invaded his bad leg. He brought with him a letter of sympathy, signed by every single worker in Buchanan’s El Segundo factory, where the Thunderer was built. Five thousand signatures, five thousand members of the fraternity of the air saying they were sorry and proud and sad for one of their own. Frank put the hundreds of sheets of soiled paper on Sarah’s coffee table and she saw them being passed from jig to jig, signed while metal shrieked and rivet guns clattered and the gigantic American flag fluttered feebly on the wall.

  Oblivious to her hatred, Frank talked of Billy and Cliff as boys, when he taught them to fly. He told her of his mother’s faith—of a world soul that connected everyone, the living and the dead, in which evil fought an eternal war with good. How he had dreamt in his youth that his planes would be weapons of inspiration on the side of the good—but now he had begun to think of them as creatures of evil. They had destroyed too many people he loved, beginning with Amanda.

  That was when Sarah learned Califia’s fate—what had happened to Amanda Van Ness. Bewildered, appalled, Ms. Sarah Morris realized this lonely old man too needed to be comforted, consoled, forgiven. The ghost of Miss Sarah Chapman was still real enough to feel the ancient tug of daughterhood, the almost extinct wish her own lost father had never fulfilled. It was the first of many visits Frank would pay, in spite of Susan Hardy’s growls of hostility.

  But the ghost of Miss Sarah Chapman was still only a ghost. Most of the time Ms. Sarah Morris and her hatred prevailed. It was not entirely her fault. America seethed with hatred during those last years of Nixon’s reign, with the lying president’s face on the television screens night after night. Ms. Sarah even welcomed into their vituperative fraternity Cassie Trainor Stone, who became a contributor to WFPF and a member of their encounter sessions.

  Listening to Cassie pour out her loathing for her absentee husband and the other Buchanan males she had known in her Honeycomb Club days, Ms. Sarah shuddered at the thought of earnest Dick Stone trying to survive this firestorm of female hatred. When Cassie announced she was divorcing Dick and returning to her Tennessee birthplace, the house resounded with mscheers. But Ms. Sarah Morris found herself feeling sorry for the failed husband.

  It was the ghost of Miss Sarah Chapman again, trickily refusing to fade away, remembering the earnest navigator who hated to bomb civilians, who in turn remembered her as a daregale skylark scanted in a cage. Was she still one? Ms. Sarah Morris wondered. Had she only changed cages?

  A week or so later, Dick Stone was on the telephone with a voice leaden enough to send whole flocks of skylarks spinning to earth in 13g dives. The Marines had awarded Charlie a Distinguished Flying Cross. They wanted to present it at a ceremony at Buchanan’s headquarters. Cliff was in Morocco trying to sell Auroras to Arabs and Africans and could not make it. Would she come?

  Once more evading Susan Hardy’s doubts, Ms. Sarah Morris said yes. It was wonderful publicity for the company, of course. She rationalized it to herself and Susan by arguing that by helping to keep Buchanan airborne she was helping herself. She was making sure the pie would be big and juicy when she stuck it to Cliff with the Big Divorce that divided his assets in half.

  It was a heartrending ceremony, which Ms. Sarah Morris survived only by letting the ghost of Miss Sarah Chapman take complete charge until it was over. The patriotic speeches, the pictures of Charlie, the whirring TV cameras and kleig lights would have been unendurable for the msshapened soul of Sarah Morris. She would have erupted into obscenities and denunciations of the war machine in the middle of it. Miss Sarah Chapman, who believed in heroes and dying for God and Country, even read one of Charlie’s favorite poems, William Butler Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” in which a boy in another war tried to explain why “a lonely tumult of delight” lured him into the sky’s murderous embrace.

  Afterward, in Dick Stone’s office, Ms. Sarah had dazedly returned to her body as Frank Buchanan and others told her how much they had loved the poem. Finally she was alone with Dick, who was looking almost as ravaged as she felt. Insomnia had gouged ridges in his face. He looked like he was barely holding on.

  “I’m sorry about Cassie,” Ms. Sarah said. “I’m afraid you didn’t get much support from our little group of mscreants.”

  He smiled gamely at the joke. “Maybe I didn’t deserve any,” he said. “Are you going to divorce Cliff?”

  “Eventually,” Ms. Sarah said and teetered on the brink of revealing the whole program. Why not let Big Cliff know—Dick would of course tell him—all about their plan to stick it to him? Instead, Miss Sarah Chapman took control again. An echoing voice whispered: like a daregale skylark scanted in a cage. She realized this mournful man confronting her was her only hope of happiness. He understood everything about her life, even the sad secret of never loving Cliff, of the wizzo WAAF drunk on bourbon and glory who had thrown herself into the big pilot’s arms.

  In the same terrible moment Ms. Sarah Morris realized she could be this man’s hope as well. She saw the knowledge in his haunted eyes—heard his oblique wish in the question about divorce. They valued the same things—honor and honesty and authentic feeling—things that Cliff could never care about if he lived to be a thousand. In a way they were both victims of that voracious all-American hero-pilot-salesman-playboy-pseudo-CEO. Victims of this devouring America with its manic pursuit of money and power and weaponry unto death.

  But Ms. Sarah Morr
is’s bitter lips were sealed against testaments of possible love. Dick Stone’s lips, hands, heart, were equally encased in that unwritten law scorched on the male brain stem—thou shalt not seduce your best friend’s wife. Trapped, sealed, condemned to pirouetting in separate space capsules through the long gray years unto eternity. So there was nothing else to do but murmur meaningless words about how grateful she was to be asked to Charlie’s enshrinement and slink back to her desert abode, her Gaza where she waited, eyeless, for the chance to bring down the temple in the name of her mserable revenge.

  THE MEANING OF MEANING

  Cliff Morris stood at the window of his corner office in Buchanan Aircraft’s El Segundo headquarters watching thousands of protestors massed on the company’s airfield at twilight, each carrying a lighted candle of peace. Inside the main factory building sat a gleaming white prototype of the BX bomber.

  “I still think we should call out the National Guard,” Cliff said. “These assholes could attack the plane—destroy it.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m hoping they’ll do,” Dick Stone said. “But we won’t get that lucky.”

  “Is it worth it, Dick? All this strife, this hatred?” Frank Buchanan said.

  “Yes,” Dick said.

  “Do you agree, Cliff?” Frank asked.

  “Yeah,” Cliff said with minimal enthusiasm.

  He did not like the way Dick Stone had taken charge of this crisis. He did not like the way Dick had taken charge of almost everything in the day-to-day operations of Buchanan. But there was not much he could do about it. Adrian Van Ness had made Dick executive vice president.

  “We can’t back down now. Among other things, we can’t afford it,” Dick said.

  It was the brutal truth. In Washington, for the third year in a row Adrian Van Ness had won a billion dollars from Congress to keep the BX alive. That was not enough to build more than the prototype but it had provided Buchanan with desperately needed cash. Unfortunately, Adrian had been unable to talk the Air Force into swallowing the five-hundred-million-dollar cost overrun on the Colossus. That cloud of red ink still loomed over the company. Last year their high-performance fighter, the SkyDemon, had lost the fly-off with General Dynamics F-16, leaving behind it another pool of red ink deep enough to drown them.

  Meanwhile, Cliff flailed around the globe frantically searching for orders for his baby, the widebody commercial jet, the Aurora. He had been able to sell 30 to the Japanese with bribes even the Prince would have considered excessive. He was now working on the Egyptians and other national airlines in the Middle East. There the bribes were certain to be even more stupendous. Almost everywhere else, Lockheed was making him look silly with their own highly developed grease machine. So far Cliff had orders for a paltry 120 copies—leaving him and the company up to their ears in another deluge of red ink.

  There were times when Cliff wondered if some kind of curse, some evil spirit, began pursuing the company the day he became CEO. Any hope of selling the Aurora domestically vanished when the Arabs created OPEC and raised oil prices into the stratosphere in 1973. The airlines’ profits vanished in a swirl of hydrocarbons. Then a careless pilot flew an Aurora into a Florida swamp, killing everyone aboard and triggering a swarm of multimillion-dollar lawsuits.

  Nixon, the president who had revived the BX bomber, was gone along with his landslide. Gone too was Vietnam—in Communist hands, abandoned by a Congress who had ignored President Gerald Ford’s pathetic cry, “Our friends are dying!” But the BX had survived, thanks to heroic lobbying by Adrian, Mike Shannon, and Buchanan’s Washington staff. They had beaten back the onslaughts of the Creature and the other critics of the Military Industrial Complex in and out of Congress.

  This year, the nation’s 200th anniversary, the critics had changed their tactics. One of the Creature’s staffers, a Quaker named Jacob Woolman, decided the BX was the perfect issue to revive the noble emotions of the antiwar movement. He had organized a national crusade against the plane, which was cresting tonight beneath their windows.

  A Buchanan helicopter rose from the roof of the main building and hovered over the crowd. From its open doors fluttered thousands of pieces of paper. The demonstrators picked them up and read them by candlelight. It was a statement signed by Cliff, welcoming them to Buchanan Field and assuring them that there were no police or National Guard troops anywhere near the premises.

  We respect your right to protest. In return, we are confident you will respect our property and the millions of dollars worth of tools and equipment used to build planes that defend this country and give thousands of skilled workers jobs.

  Dick Stone had written the statement. Dick had assessed the mood of the country and decided conciliation, not confrontation, was the way to go. “Instead of them making us look bad, we’ll make them look bad,” Dick said. Adrian Van Ness liked the idea; hardly surprising—it showed how much Dick had learned from the master of forethought.

  The statement was part of the game plan. So was banning the police. Whenever pickets appeared outside their headquarters building, Dick sent them coffee and sandwiches. He had Cliff’s picture taken talking to them.

  “Don’t pay any attention to those lying words,” Jacob Woolman screamed from the platform. Behind him a rock band struck up “We Shall Overcome.” Woolman, still bedecked in sixties love beads, led the crowd through the hymn. A Catholic priest who had become famous during the same tormented decade read one of his poems about a Vietnamese child killed by American bombs. Woolman gave a ranting hysterical speech in which he attacked the Military Industrial Complex of the United States and Israel. He linked the Palestinians in their refugee camps with the blacks in the ghettos and the villagers in Vietnam.

  “Did you hear that, Stone? He’s attacking Israel. Why don’t you go down there and punch him in the mouth?” Cliff said.

  “If it gets the Israeli lobby on our side, I’ll hug him instead,” Dick said.

  Bruce Simons, their public relations director, returned from a tour of the crowd. He grabbed Cliff by the arm. “I found Sarah. She’s not going to make a statement, thank God.”

  Cliff nodded glumly. Sarah was another reason why he was keeping a low profile tonight. She was down there with the demonstrators, using their son Charlie as her justification. Charlie—and Billy McCall. She said she was doing penance for her sins against them both—whatever that meant. Sin was not an idea Cliff understood. It smelled musty, absurd, a word from another century.

  She had made no attempt to divorce him after their explosion of mutual loathing the night Charlie died. Somehow that made Cliff feel safe. She was still part of his luck, no matter how badly it seemed to be running. She was still the figure on the runway as he fought to bring the shattered Rainbow Express home from Schweinfurt.

  Sarah spent most of her time at their Palm Springs house, which Cliff ceded as her turf. They kept in touch on family matters, especially their problems with their older daughter, Elizabeth, who spent a year in a drug rehab center and another year with her mother putting her mind back together. Sarah had done a good job with her. Elizabeth was now happily married to the doctor who had rescued her.

  Dick Stone told Bruce Simons to make Woolman’s attack on Israel the lead in his statement to the press. “Stress how pained we all were because the heroic Israelis fly so many of our planes,” he said.

  The roar of airliners landing at LAX kept drowning out the music and the speakers. In about an hour the crowd began to dissolve. By eleven o’clock the protest was over. Everyone agreed by the standards of the sixties it was a flop. Dick Stone telephoned Adrian Van Ness with the good news. He was not very responsive. His voice crackled over the speakerphone on Cliff’s desk, sounding like someone from outer space.

  “One more trip over Niagara Falls survived,” he said, “Any good news on the Aurora?”

  Cliff went into overdrive about the prospects for Mideast sales. The Egyptians, the Moroccans, the Tunisians were in love with the plane. It was a li
e, of course. What they loved were the James Madisons in Cliff’s briefcase.

  “Let me know when love translates into cash,” Adrian said. Panic roiled Cliff’s flesh but he concealed it with his usual skill.

  Downstairs Dick Stone thanked Dan Hanrahan and his security men for playing the game his way. Trying to minimize his surly performance during the demonstration, Cliff shifted gears. “Good flight plan, Navigator. Feel like relaxing over a drink?”

  Dick shook his head. “I’ve got a date with a couple of union leaders at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  Watching Dick trudge back to his office, Cliff thought he saw signs of strain. Several sources had told him Dr. Willoughby had barred booze from Dick’s diet and was holding him together with a careful mix of tranquilizers and antidepressants. It had been a year since Cassie divorced him and went back to Tennessee.

  Up the freeways Cliff roared to Angela Perry’s house in Holmby Hills, his home away from home in Los Angeles these days. A party was in progress as he arrived. There always seemed to be a party in progress. There were the usual nubile starlets in miniskirts and pretty boys in Gucci jeans, dancing to rock music that blasted from the most expensive stereo system in California.

  Cliff found Angela in bed, watching the evening news with one of the ex-sixties activists sitting on the floor beside her. His name was Sam something but Cliff always called him Lenin Jr. He had been tear-gassed in Chicago in 1968 and had showed up at all the other right places from Woodstock to Altamont to Kent State to acquire a niche in the Movement’s hall of fame. He looked like Pinocchio, except that his nose was not quite as long. He had the same cockeyed eyes and smarmy smile. He also (in Cliff’s opinion) thought like someone with a brain made of wood.

  Cliff kissed Angela and rubbed her swollen stomach. She was nine months pregnant. “How is he?”